Independent Press Award
2025 Distinguished Favorite
Brooke Champagne
NOLA Face: A Latina's Life in the Big Easy
This collection traces the evolutions of this girlhood of competing languages, ethnicities, aesthetics, politics, and class constraints against the backdrop of a boozy New Orleans upbringing. In these essays, Champagne and members of her family love poorly and hate well, whip and get whipped, pray and curse in two languages, steal from The Man and give to themselves, kiss where it hurts, poke where it hurts worse, and keep and spill each other's secrets―first face-to-face, then on the page. They believe and doubt and reckon with the stories they tell about themselves and where they come from, finally becoming most human, most alive, in their connections to one another.